“We have just recently announced the new series of VM sizes for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines called the G-series, providing the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD of any Virtual Machine size currently available in the public cloud. It easily handles deployments of mission critical applications such as large relational database servers (SQL Server, MySQL, etc.) and large NoSQL databases as well as the most demanding, very large scale-up enterprise systems.

G-series offers up to 32 vCPUs using the latest Intel® Xeon® processor E5 v3 family, 448GB of memory, and 6.59 TB of local Solid State Drive (SSD) space.”

Hackers have targeted about 19,000 French websites since a rampage by Islamic extremists left 20 dead last week, France’s cyberdefense official said Thursday, as the president tried to calm the nation’s inflamed religious tensions.

France is on edge since last week’s attacks, which began Jan. 7 at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The paper, repeatedly threatened for its caricatures of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, was burying several of its slain staff members Thursday.

Calling it an unprecedented surge, Adm. Arnaud Coustilliere, head of cyberdefense for the French military, said about 19,000 French websites had faced cyberattacks in recent days, some carried out by well-known Islamic hacker groups.

It appears the ‘Lizard Squad’ DDoS ‘service’ is already out of business. The sleazy service was relatively new and caused outrage on the Internet due to its, uh, illegal activity: basically it would bombard websites until they could no longer reply to other requests (http), i.e. people would get a ‘page cannot be displayed’ type of message during said bombardment.

DDoS is not new at all, but the Lizard Losers actually set up a business via Paypal or Bitcoin, where one could pay them online for periodic outages of chosen websites. So, they monetized illegal internet activity. They also set up an impressive website. And, to add insult to injury, there is a YouTube video demo of sorts. Check it at the ‘Engadget’ link below. It’s very interesting.

Their service did not last too long, but look for more of this in the coming months or years …

I am not sure about other Exchange Server Email infrastructure administrators, but I find it challenging to come up with reasonable mailbox quotas AND implementing them in a time efficient and coherent manor. The goal is to set maximum mailbox size quotas that work for all involved: I.T. Departments and various employees and respective departments. […]

I normally get what is needed from my Windows phone Outlook, but some searching and sorting type of improvements would not be turned down.Microsoft Acquires Email Startup Acompli to Give Outlook a Mobile Advantage"Microsoft has acquired the mobile email startup Acompli, the tech giant announced today on its website.Terms of the deal were not disclosed, […]

This is not the best news, as I am embarking on some Azure based projects at work. Come on now, all you expert Microsoft Engineers - make it happen (work / fix)! Btw - What about all that redundancy? ;>"Xbox Live Goes Down Again: Second Major Outage This Month [Updated]"http://www.ibtimes.com/xbox-live-goes-down-again-second-major-outage-month-updated-1725918

Hyper-V Manager within Windows Server 2012 (Datacenter Edition) can sometimes produce an odd error when attempting to turn on a typical virtual machine or VM after it has been shut down: This error might make sense if the user is not logged in as an Administrator, but really what organization gives Windows 2012 Datacenter Hyper-V access […]